After a half hour or so of hearing him toss around, I went in to check on him. He was very upset. He said, “Daddy, why can’t I sleep in my bed tonight?”

His bed was at our house where there was no electricity, no heat, and a clogged sewer line that couldn’t be cleared until the power was restored. And it was getting down into the 20s at night. I reassured him that we’d be able to go home soon and he could get back to his routine.

So as I lay there and comforted my son who had held up for the first four nights like a champ, I nearly lost it, too. I had been trying to balance work (in the news business where we were busy covering the storms aftermath with something more like obsession and overkill than completeness) with making sure my family was safe and warm and my house was getting repaired and services restored. It had definitely taken a toll on me as well.

So I rubbed his back and sang the usual bedtime songs to help him get to sleep so that I could get some rest, too. But he piped up with a twist, “I want you to sing me a new song.”

I was surprised and a little nervous. I’m not a singer, and I just don’t know the words to that many songs — at least not ones appropriate for singing a 6-year-old to sleep. Bit it was late and we were both physically and mentally exhausted, so I sang him a new song: R.E.M.’s “Driver 8,” which is one of my absolute favorite songs and the first one I learned to play on my guitar close to 20 years ago and — most importantly — one of the few songs I know most of the words to.

“Driver 8″ is a great song, but not really a lullaby from any direction you approach it. It could be about a deranged train engineer, a long ago failed relationship, just pastoral scenes from the South, or lots of other things. Michael Stipe’s lyrics in the the early days were often obscure and difficult to understand even when you could decipher which words he was singing.

So, I sang this great but possibly inappropriate song to a tired and frustrated little boy who was trying to fall asleep in a strange bed for the fifth night in a row.

And he loved it.

It didn’t really put him to sleep, but we had a long talk about “floaters” and why they would be on powerlines, which lead to a conversation about cropdusters (and trains, of course).

We got to go back to our re-electrified home a couple of nights later, and things returned more or less to normal, including the same old couple of bedtime songs.

But when he’s really tired or maybe not feeling great, he asks for “Driver 8″ and it seems to help him get to sleep. It’s even more my favorite song than ever now.

Personally, it was a VERY disturbing and motivating experience. We were out of power for 6.5 days (early Tuesday through the next Monday afternoon). We lost a number of large limbs from our lovely trees (we live in an old neighborhood with large mature trees), our electrical service was ripped off the house by a fallen limb, and our back porch cover was partially smashed. We’re still cleaning up the yard (and waiting for the crew our insurance company hired to remove the porch cover).

Not only were we out of power, our sewer connection was backed up the entire time, too, so we didn’t have running water, either. This happens a couple of times a year at our house due to tree roots getting into our old pipes, but it couldn’t have happened at a worse time this year.

Maybe it’s having a child, but this was much worse than the ice storm of 1994 we lived through in Oxford, Mississippi, when we were without power (and water, as the town water plant lost power) for about four days. It was MUCH worse than the ice storm we weathered here in Fayetteville in December 2000, when we lost power for about three days. We had almost no damage then, either.

I was pretty freaked out for the first couple of weeks. I really felt like I got caught unawares. If this had been a Katrina-level disaster, we would have really been screwed. I’ve started researching survival and preparedness resources (blogs, books, etc.), and I plan to be better prepared for the next natural — or unnatural) disaster — that hits Fayetteville. Several friends who are also getting better prepared and I are hoping to blog our research and preparations, and I’ll have more about that in a week or so.

Though the news outlets (especially 40/29 News) covered the storm (and closings, etc.) well, I got most of my information via Twitter where people were using the nwaicestorm09 hash tag. I got updates on friends via Facebook, too.